GAD! Zine

    Note: This review is taken from GAD! Zine 31 and is for the title track of the recently released Southern Fantasia album. Expect a full review of the full-length VERY soon!!   Dayam! It's great to have these dudes back! I'm excited for the upcoming album. Got the same yell-y and sing-y thing going that they killed at years back. This isn't some nostalgia trip, though. This is modern and thoughtful and bright. This is that kinda music that is just... literate. Everything feels like it has a reason to be. To my ears, the full-length may very well blow away everything they've done before. We could seriously use more socially conscious artists like LFT in this state!                                                                                      ...

  I rem ember talking to other punk rockers in like 1997 about how hard it was to find a studio in or around Alabama that could (or would) record punk rock. Much less allow it to sound like a “proper” punk record. So how the fuck did t eenage “Alabama” Donnie Sharp and friends pull it off in 1983?? Legend has it that the Knockabouts were the first hardcore punk band in Alabama. If they weren’t, I’d say they were the most important. Underground bands to in the Huntsville area, to this day, have hints of it in their sound . Whether they know it or not. And this isn’t one of those band s we mention cuz they were just the first ones there. I mean they really kiiiiiiiicked ass! Nuclear blasts of thrashy sped-up punk. Noisy and chaotic and super slam- danceable . Included on this definitive collection are straight-up classics like “Where’s My Vietnam?” and the ir vicious take on Skyn y rd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” .  Lots of fast punkery for sure, but with cool experi...

         Call it glitch goth, bedroom pop, or some form of slowed down hyper pop. Whatever genre this EP fits in, it should be viewed as something unique and special. This is Akikzza’s (Kikky Jackson) second or third release but the first in its style. Ranging from the melancholy opening track “hello” to the partially hip hop tracks “lost” and “mom i made it”, both of which feature phenomenal verses from local rappers ZENCII and Rain Swann respectively. The glitchy drums and almost 8-bit instrumentation at times gives the record an incredibly original sound, especially when compared to other musical projects coming out the southeast region. Instrumental tracks like “busy” and “shroomie” offer intermissions of sorts between the heavy hitting pitch-shifted vocal bits that have on some listens brought me to tears. Lyrically, the EP adopts a consistent idea filled with well-crafted personal concepts that only Akikkza could write. In the spirit of concept records, al...

              COOL SPLIT ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!      Lighthouse ’s “It’s No Time To Care” is a very cool song that starts like an early New Order tune. Mostly a very “clean” sounding recording, but the music wraps around and envelops ya like the best shoegaze always does . Dreamy stuffs. Also, this may be some of Jesse N.’s best vocals to date. “A Closed Door” is almost a counterpoint to the tune before it. Chunky garage-iness. The drums just pound the floor and rattle the lights. Of the two LH songs, this one’s the rocker, not to say that the other is a recliner.     Comic Mischief ’s “Baked Ziti” is a dizzy little dash of indie poppiness. Somewhere between the Smiths, early New Order, and The Dead Milkmen. In other words, they don’t sound like any of those bands but I like those bands, too, and I’m sleepy, so I’ll lump them all together. Dig those harmonies! “That time I almost died at The Coffee Bar in Gadsden, AL on Janu...

I’ve been following these guys since before they even fully formed this group. I’ve performed with three of them in a couple of other longtime and one-off projects and they’re seriously among the best musicians the northeast Alabama region has to offer. In preparation for the release of their first full length “You Can Call Me Anything You Want” they’ve given us a taste of what’s ahead with “Fool’s Gold”. The single features lead vocals from guitarist Kody Martinez that really nail the 70’s rock sound the band regularly reinvents with a small hint of the folk rock that was big in that same era. He is, of course, backed by the rest of the band with noteworthy harmonies. The dueling guitar work from Kody and Zane Probus is always a highlight of seeing the band live, but it really comes to a front during the jam driven solo section of this single. On the bass, Sam Summerhill delivers a driving, but not too busy, bass line that catapults the song to something of a “summer anthem”, Simil...

    The year is 2025. The state of punk is in a weird place, reminiscent of some sort of inverted, Bizarro reality: every conservative ideal 2 allied so arduously against during the Reagan era has infected the country 10,000 fold, but many punks of that era have swallowed the MAGA Kool-Aid and have fallen victim to the same system they once decried. Despite this, there are some caveats to living in the mirror world. For one thing, Tiger Hellicide are good now.      The band's latest offering, The River Squid, feels like the culmination of decades of sprawling escapades into experimentation with the depths of dissonance cataclysmically coming to fruition, This record, quite simply, kicks ass. In the most cathartic, lived-in, gritty, real life, authentic way, portraying the suffering wrought by the mundanity of middle-of-nowhere existence that only the most daring, non-pretentious, working class post-punk can. Tiger Hellicide have transcended their mortal form and...